1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a management apparatus of structured information, a method of managing the information, and a recording medium that stores a program for implementing the method and, more particularly, to a technique suitably used in a system which supports creation, control, and use of related or structured information.
2. Background of the Invention
In general, upon developing a system or making tasks using the developed system, various kinds of information are used. These pieces of information are not independent in practice, but normally have relationships with other kinds of information. Not only in the field of system development, but also in various other fields (for example, upon creating various documents such as presentation references, on-line manuals, and the like, or various databases such as address books, glossaries, and the like), these pieces of information to be used often have relationships.
In such cases, one often wants to have flexibility in managing related, i.e., structured information with a computer. For example, to improve the productivity of software development, it is effective to control appropriately the meanings of terms and their associated information that appear in a specification. More specifically, an improvement in development efficiency may be expected if a system defined by the relationship between the specification and terms, the relationship between terms on the specification and implementation information (information such as variable names upon programming, or variable types, constraints, and the like), the relationship between terms (synonyms or the like), and so forth is appropriately controlled. It is more convenient if not only synonyms but also sets of conceptually relevant information such as xe2x80x9ccomputerxe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9cpersonal computerxe2x80x9d are related to each other.
Conventionally, some tools for managing such structured information have been proposed and are used. However, these tools must relate sets of information in accordance with their predetermined schemes, and for example, a pair of information, which have relationships bidirectionally, must be related to each other in both directions. For this reason, the structure cannot be freely defined, and the operation is very cumbersome.
For example, in system development, many people work in collaboration to create and manage such structured information. In this case, anomalies are highly likely to crop up in the created structure of information. Conventionally, such anomalies must be manually found and corrected.
Even when a tool for finding anomalies is used, it merely finds an anomaly and informs the user of an error. Hence, in the conventional approach, consistency must be checked every time one item of information is input, and one proceeds with tasks while checking/maintaining consistency.
In this case, in a collaboration of operators, an operator has to wait for input from another operator before he or she can input his or her own information, or his or her input may be disabled by failures of another operator. In addition, if such work is not done in perfect concert, errors occur again. As a result, such collaboration requires a very long time to remove anomalies.
If an anomaly is found, information that includes the anomaly, and one of collaborators who created the information must be checked, and the next task must be started after the anomaly is removed. In this case, both of the information which has caused an anomaly and the information which is related thereto cannot be input to the system and cannot be used.
In this manner, the conventional tool for managing structured information is not suitable for collaboration of a large number of operators since they must carefully proceed with tasks in the process of creation of information.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a system which can freely define the structure of structured information by simple operations, and can cope with collaborations of a large number of operators.
In order to achieve the above object, according to the present invention, a management apparatus for managing information with a structure, comprises first input means for inputting a definition of the structure, second input means for inputting a data definition representing an entity of each piece of information and a relationship between entities in accordance with the structure definition input by the first input means, and modeling means for interpreting the definitions input by the first and second input means and converting them into an ER model.
According to another aspect of the present invention, the apparatus further comprises anomaly detection means for detecting an anomaly of definition contents when the definitions input by the first and second input means are converted into the ER model by the modeling means.
According to still another aspect of the present invention, the apparatus further comprises means for developing the ER model into hypertext.
According to the present invention, a method of managing information with a structure, comprises the steps of inputting a definition of the structure, inputting a data definition representing an entity of each piece of information and a relationship between entities in accordance with the input structure definition, and converting the input definitions into an ER model by interpreting the definitions.
According to the present invention, a computer readable recording medium records a program for making a computer in a management apparatus for managing information with a structure, function as first input means for inputting a definition of the structure, second input means for inputting a data definition representing an entity of each piece of information and a relationship between entities in accordance with the structure definition input by the first input means, and modeling means for interpreting the definitions input by the first and second input means and converting them into an ER model.
As described above, according to the present invention, since the means for converting target information into an ER model in accordance with the input structure definition or data definition is provided, an identical ER model can be obtained independently of the input formats of definitions. Hence, the user can freely define the structure of information as he or she likes regardless of the complexity of that structure. In addition, since information need be related from one direction only, the structure of information can be easily defined, and the work efficiency upon creating and managing structured information can be greatly improved.
According to another feature of the present invention, since means for detecting anomalies of definition contents when an input definition is converted into an ER model is provided, anomalies can be automatically detected and presented upon conversion into an ER model, and the work efficiency upon creating structured information can be greatly improved. Hence, the work efficiency can be improved even in a collaboration of a large number of operators, in which anomalies are highly likely to occur.
According to still another feature of the present invention, since the means for developing the converted ER model into hypertext is also provided, a high-speed information navigation environment can be obtained. Since the ER model can clearly define the relationship between entities, movement between entities can be freely indicated bidirectionally, and cross reference of information can be easily attained.